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Something that seems all too common with tech companies is the “not our fault syndrome.” If a problem develops, hardware support says blames it on your software. Software support blames it on your hardware. A service provider says lays blame with another service provider, your hardware and/or your software.
I encountered this situation this month in trying to resolve problems with the news server provider I’ve subscribed to for almost six years for Usenet newsgroups. This one, though, may have a happy ending.
Long story short, after a variety of e-mails with support detailing and documenting the problem and the fact it appeared to be at their end, I ended up with nine days of silence. I took the only action I could. I canceled my subscription online and told them why. I got an e-mail a few days later telling me they had made “improvements” that may have solved my problem and to use my cancellation grace period to see if it had been resolved. Although I was a bit irritated it took a cancellation to get action, it appears the problem may be fixed.
What’s surprising is the e-mail I got Thursday from the company’s manager of systems administration. Among other things, it said:
I have read the history of the trouble ticket that you submitted, and I am truly sorry for the way we mishandled your complaint in early January. Our failing caused you to suffer poor speeds for weeks longer than should have been necessary to solve the issue. It was completely our fault, and we absolutely failed to give you the service you deserve.
…. it saddens me to see how badly we mishandled your complaint and caused you sufficient frustration to cancel. Please be assured that we will be reviewing the mistakes that were made, and your experience will be made into a learning experience for our entire support staff.
I don’t remember the last time, if ever, a business told me it was responsible for a problem and “absolutely failed” to provide proper service.
The e-mail also offered me a month’s free service at a higher level if I voided my cancellation during the grace period. While I’ve done so, I’m also taking the individual at his word when he says what happened to me will be used as a learning experience for the company’s staff. My responsive e-mail told him it is was more the way things were handled than the underlying problem that irritated me and detailed exactly what I thought could/should have been handled differently. I also told him that while I was thankful for the month’s free service, it would actually be the company’s grace period regarding the problem that currently appears resolved.
It’s refreshing, almost shocking, to see a company own up to mistakes. What’s sad is that it is so surprising.
If the world would apologize, I might consider a reconciliation.
Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms, Tenth Selection
A longer than anticipated collection of items that piqued my interest recently:
- Kudos to Cory for pointing out that one of the historic figures of Sioux Falls was one of Lenin’s favorite authors and leading us to the book itself, which you can read online or download. (I did the latter and will probably start perusing it yet today.)
- Speaking of older books, it’s definitely worth at least checking out The Secret Museum of Mankind, a scanned copy of a 1935 book that was billed as the “Worlds’ Greatest Collection of Strange & Secret Photographs.” (Via.)
- I think I need this. (Also via.)
- Having recently made reference to the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, I was pleased to see the longlist for this year’s prize has been released. Gee, a whole list of books to check up on at the local library website or Amazon. (Via.)
- Kathleen Goonan’s In War Times won the 2008 Reading List Award in the SF category. The awards, given by the American Library Association, go to books in eight different adult fiction genres, including SF, fantasy, horror, mystery, romance and historical fiction. While I’ve not read the winner, I have read five of the other nine nominees. (Via.)
- The blog three percent gives us a two-part short guide to literary Minneapolis and Minneapolis book culture.
- I will never cease to be amazed and disgusted by such insane hatred, whether religious, ethnic or nationalist. (Via.)
- So THAT’S what happens when I click “Publish.” (Also via.)
Pretty soon, you’ll be an old bastard too
“Bastard,” Ben Folds, Songs For Silverman
I could simply just rave about how Friday night’s performance by the Joe Lovano Quartet ranks among the top shows in my memory in the SFJB Concert Series. Yet a particular thought often came to mind during the concert: how grateful I am that I had college roommates who helped me develop an appreciation for jazz.
Lovano’s quartet played a range of tunes, almost like a jazz survey. While bop lay under most of it, there were ballads, a touch of more free form jazz and even a bossa nova/samba feel. Whether it was Lovano’s own compositions or tunes by Thad Jones, John Coltrane and even Ornette Coleman (generally outside the bop stream), this was a tight quartet of truly gifted musicians. (Lovano, in fact, has two Grammy nominations for Kids, a live duet performance with Mel Jones.) Yet it is largely by chance that I came to learn about jazz.
During my last two years of college most of my roommates in the large house we shared were music majors and jazz aficionados. We ended up rooming together because of a mutual friend who also lived in the house. I will always remember something that happened one of the first days in that house. I put an album on the stereo, Silk Degrees as I recall. It was immediately greeted with howls of “What!?!” and “Who put that on ?!?” Minutes later my jazz education began.
I don’t recall the exact album that was almost immediately put on in place of my selection. It may have been Kind of Blue but I know it was jazz. Now you don’t have to be a hardcore jazz head to appreciate Kind of Blue. But over the course of the next two years I listened to — and learned to enjoy — artists as diverse as Miles, Coltrane, Don Ellis, Woody Herman, Wayne Shorter and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, to name a handful. The range was from straightforward jazz to fusion (to which I’d had some exposure) to the free jazz sounds of artists like Coleman, Sun Ra and Eric Dolphy. While I disliked free jazz, I could only learn from the depth and breadth of my virtually daily exposure over those two years (we probably could have opened a record store with the albums we had among us).
This was not as force fed as it may sound. I had the advantage of living with people who didn’t hesitate to point out what they liked, what they disliked and, more important, why. It didn’t take long at all for me to realize I had been unaware of some astounding music. I soon developed an affinity for bop and West Coast jazz. Because Lovano and his quartet excelled at some of what I like best about jazz as a whole and the bop idiom, I couldn’t help but think back to those days as the performance left me enthralled.
Like many, I can’t really describe what it is that draws me into jazz. In fact, I remain convinced that when my roommates and I listened to a jazz album, we weren’t hearing the same thing. I recall an envious feeling that they heard something different, something deeper and richer. Be that as it may, that two year “education” broadened my music horizon and meant decades of great listening pleasure for me. So I owe a great debt to all those guys. I never would have imagined the happenstance that made us roommates would reverberate musically for three decades.
[I]t bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not. It’s feeling.
Bill Evans, Down Beat (Dec. 8, 1960)
There are two sides to most things and, generally, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Gary Kowalski’s Revolutionary Spirits: The Enlightened Faith of America’s Founding Fathers demonstrates the adage applies to views of how the founders of this country saw the role of religion.
Today, many on the Christian right argue that the intent of the founders was to form a Christian nation. Many on the other side of the aisle not only contend there was no such intent but that many of the founders weren’t Christians, didn’t believe in the Bible or were borderline atheists. Kowalski uses brief biographies of six founding fathers — Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Paine, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison — to show neither position has an exclusive lock on the truth. In fact, Kowalski’s work indicates that their religious leanings were largely a nature-based spirituality that incorporated some Christian doctrine but did not necessarily adopt the Bible chapter and verse.
Kowalski’s profiles show each of these individuals reflects their time. They were all part of the so-called Age of Enlightenment, a period grounded in applying reason and systematic thinking to not only the natural sciences but political philosophy. Kowalski, a Harvard-educated Unitarian-Universalist minister, explores each man’s interest in the sciences, be it botany, astronomy or mathematics, and how the analytical thought applied in those fields tended to carry over to their views of religion. Thus, while Adams was a regular churchgoer, most were Deists and not necessarily devout and confirmed Christians. They saw and found God not in revelatory scripture but in nature and life. They may have adopted elements of the teachings of Jesus as part of their belief system but still applied a skeptical eye at portions of the Bible. As such, Kowalski says, they were “religious liberals.”
Revolutionary Spirits occasionally intimates that their views were outside mainstream colonial or American thought at the time. Still, Kowalski leaves no doubt there were religious aspects to these men, even if they were not devout adherents to a particular creed. Yet their use of reason and evidence to reach conclusions also seems to have led them to a belief that no particular religion should be dictated to people. Instead, each person should be free to advocate and reach their own conclusions about religious beliefs, even if that meant rejecting religion.
Revolutionary Spirits does not advance any earthshaking contentions in this regard. It does, however, take a concise and handy approach toward the topic. Still, that approach has pitfalls. Perhaps the most glaring is that the six individuals tend to be examined in relative isolation. While we see how various ideas overlap between and among them, we don’t see how or whether their views were ultimately synthesized in the country’s founding documents. Thus, although all but Paine played roles in the Constitutional Convention and the eventual adoption of the Bill of Rights, Kowalski does not explore how their particular ideas were expressed, modified or rejected in those documents. Perhaps Kowalski believes such topics are better left for constitutional scholars or those who are wont to debate questions of “original intent” as opposed to a work aimed at a more general audience. To the limited extent mention is made of these issues, the book quietly raises the interesting question of whether their views mean those documents reflect mainstream political thought or were aimed at providing protection from the mainstream.
Those who believe the country was founded as a Christian nation may find Revolutionary Spirits one-sided and cite to various writings or statements by these individuals that contradict material used in Kowalski’s profiles. Likewise, those with the opposite views likely can point to other writings or statements excerpts they believe indicate the founders sought to establish a godless nation. Examining existing evidence with the reason he believes was fundamental to the lives of those he profiles, Kowalski makes a strong and highly readable case that the truth is at neither extreme.
Deeds mattered more than creeds.
Gary Kowalski, Revolutionary Spirits
It was just less than three years ago that I decided to move the focus of this blog away from politics and the like to “things that actually bring pleasure, meaning and nuance to life.” This has covered a variety of things over those three years but mostly books and reading. While it may not produce the same kind or amounts of traffic as political and other issues, I think this approach is effective in its own small way.
The largest source of traffic here is search engines, such as Google. I’ve noticed a steady increase in the number of book-related searches that bring people here, particularly in the last few months. For example, Google Analytics indicates that eight of the 10 pages viewed most often and six of the top 10 pages visited first are book reviews or book-related posts. (As might be expected, the main page is number one in each category.) Another statistical service indicates that roughly half the searches that bring people to the site are related to books in general or a particular book.
I know from experience that political items tend to generate more traffic. And, granted, some political links and doodads still appear here. But the change from politics (with a too long exception resulting from an initiated measure on the 2006 ballot) never was about generating traffic. In fact, if traffic was the goal, it made no sense to move away from politics. At the same time, it was never my intent to create a so-called “litblog.” The purpose was simply to give myself an outlet for my thoughts, both pertinent and inane, about the things in life I enjoy.
It’s refreshing to see that in the morass of a presidential campaign others are looking for and interested in a reading life.
[P]eople repeat vaguely that books are the medicine of the mind. Yes; but to apply the medicine is the thing!
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Caxtons
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Disclaimer 
Additionally, some links on this blog go to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. There is no additional cost to you. Contact me You can e-mail me at prairieprogressive at gmaildotcom.
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